The Kahun Gynaecological Papyrus

Flinders Petrie found the papyrus in 1889 near the modern town of Lahun in the Fayum, at the site he called Kahun, a town that had prospered under Amenemhat III and his successors. It was badly damaged. Francis Ll. Griffith restored it in 1890 and in 1898 published it in facsimile with a hieroglyphic transcription and an English translation. It is kept in the Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology at University College London as UC 32057.

A note on the back is dated to year 29 of Amenemhat III, which places the text around 1825 BCE, in the Twelfth Dynasty of the Middle Kingdom. The papyrus is about a meter long and 32 centimeters high. Its three pages hold 34 cases, marked off in red ink. Most begin with the woman's symptoms, tell the physician what to say in diagnosis, and then give a treatment; some later entries are bare prescriptions. None proposes surgery.

Many diagnoses blame the womb for pain elsewhere in the body. In Stephen Quirke's translation for University College London, the physician is to say of a woman whose eyes ache until she cannot see that it is discharges of the womb in her eyes; she is to be fumigated with incense and fresh oil and fed a fresh donkey's liver. For a woman ill from her womb wandering, the physician asks what she smells and fumigates her with it. Other remedies use carob, cow's milk, honey and oil.

The last sections turn to conception, with incense, fresh oil, dates and sweet beer. Helena Trindade Lopes and Ronaldo Gurgel Pereira read the next lines as contraceptive recipes using crocodile dung, honey and natron; in Quirke's translation the crocodile dung line opens 'For preventing' and the next word is lost. The papyrus seems to have been compiled from a practitioner's notes or handbook. After Griffith's edition it drew little close study until H. Grapow's survey of Egyptian medical papyri, published between 1954 and 1973.